25 May 2008, Tibetan Olympics Gran Finale, on Black and White Film

These are the photos of the Gran Finale of the Tibetan Olympics, taken on black and white film. Like i've written earlier in a post, i wasn't giving much attention to the games data or statistics. The best information i have to give about this event, i believe is that in all these days that i lived among the athletes and the volunteers, i never heard or witnessed some kind of a fight or quarell or a bad word or energy. All i witnessed was harmony and friendliness. The athletes, while honouring and celebrating their individuality, they remained part of a team. Actually the word team might be a shallow desription of what i sence as a  deeper feeling of interconnection between these people, the athletes and Tibetan in general. I wish the people of my own country were more like that. The people of my country are the same deep interconnected with each other. But it seems that we are fighting against that, while people like Tibetans have a strong foundation of being together for a cause. Now that i'm writting this, is big time trouble for my country. At the same time i receive e-mail about the situation now in Tibet from http://www.freetibet.org/campaigns/tibet-rising, about the Tibet Spring protests that have just reached Lhasa and about the grim situation under the present regime. If you look at it from a much bigger perception, the so called "western world" have benefited from the Tibetan diaspora, who fleeding the country's occupation, introduced back to our culture the light of consciousness and gave back their meaning to universal ideas that were misunderstood in our profit-driven world,  like the one wich comes on the ancient Greek word Empathy. But at the same time the people in Tibet right now, are living a reality of a draconian occupation. Nothing can come as sollution to the world's problems from political means, it has become so clear nowadays, there's nothing that arms can really change. Is it time to realise that the only change can come from our own raise of consciousness?...
....   In June i am going to start posting the photos of McLeod Ganj that i took during my stay for and after the Tibetan Olympics. And i will also post a much more concentrated photo story of the event in my website, www.eliasstaris.com

25 Μαυ 2008, Tibetan Olympics Gran Finale, On Film

Οne of the things i like about telling stories with photography is that i don't have to say a lot of words. It seems that i got overloaded by editing the photos all these days, no words come at the moment to write down. I also have to aknowledge that i'm posting more pictures than i would normally. That is because i hope that the participants, athletes and volunteers, of the games will have the chance to see them here. In the future i will be taking some of these pictures out, in order for the story telling to be more clear. The photos i'm posting today are shot on colour negative film, with a Nikon F5 camera and a 24mm, a 28-35mm and a 100mm lenses. My digital camera at the time, was so used and updated that it didn't allowed me to take good resolution pictures at any time i wished. That means it was jamming a lot so i had to carry my film camera with me. That also means that when i returned home i had to develop the films (the black and white films on my own), then scan each one of the pictures on the film to the computer and then edit them. This in some part explains why a lot of these pictures weren't edited and shown before. Now i feel very happy to have completed this story, it feels like i have experienced again this amazing event, like i've been once more around those wonderful people, like i have just won a race.